The AP story on the long-overdue arrest of Edgar Killen for the murder of three civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964 briefly mentions that Killen is a part-time preacher.
A few minutes of Googling tells the rest of that part of the story.
Killen is a Southern Baptist preacher, part of the "Christian" holier-than-thou church that defended slavery, lynching and segregation then, and is actively conspiring to take over our government and force its peculiar "moral values" on the rest of us now.
Details below.
According to the University of Missouri at Kansas City Law School's site (the first hit when you Google Edgar Killen), Killen is an ordained Baptist minister who was an active Ku Klux Klan leader.
Nicknamed "The Preacher," Killen also worked as a sawmill owner and was a kleagle (recruiter/organizer) for Neshoba and Lauderdale counties back in the 1960s. He helped organize the burning of Mount Zion Church on June 16, 1964, then was the "point man in the conspiracy to murder the three civil rights workers on June 21."
Killen was tipped off by a deputy sheriff when the three men were set free from county jail. He then organized the Klan murder gang, advising participants to bring rubber gloves.
At the federal civil rights trial in 1967, Killen passed a note to his lawyer with a suggested cross-examination question. The lawyer then read the question, asking a black minister whether two of the murdered men had tried to "get young Negro males to sign statements that they would rape one white woman a week during the hot summer of 1964 here in Mississippi." The judge was not amused.
Killen was acquitted on an 11-1 vote. The holdout said she could not vote to convict a preacher.
Killen's Klanish views have not changed over the year, according to a friendly 2004 interview on www.nationalist.org on the first Google page.
Asked if there's "any chance you will change your beliefs and turn against your own people, the way George Wallace did," Killen replied, "No, I sure will never do that."
He also noted that he "pastored churches all through Neshoba County for over fifty years."
Killen is evidently still a Baptist preacher in good standing. He is also, according to the testimony of several fellow Klansmen, an unrepentant racist terrorist murderer.
What kind of church is this, that has such preachers? And how do leaders of this church dare to lecture us on "moral values"?
We on the left are constantly implored to denounce silly things said by people like Whoopi Goldberg or Chevy Chase.
But the major right-wing church in the country maintains a terrorist murderer as a preacher. And no one really wonders why; after all, we all know that Southern Baptists stand for the traditional values of the South, no matter how blood-soaked.